How do you forget the letter H?

In April 2010, Kaela Gedda forgot the letter “H.”

Suffering a migraine and beginning to see spots, she tried texting a friend — but couldn’t spell the word “had.”

“It was scary, because, how do you forget the letter ‘H?’”  she says.

Stroke survivor Kaela Gedda. Photo by L Photography by Michelle

Kaela forgot because of the stroke she suffered a year ago. Although she has since undergone treatment — including heart surgery — she still experiences the after-effects, like forgetting the letter “H.” And Kaela is lucky: brain injuries can affect the senses, emotions, body awareness, motor activity and speech. Many other instances result in death.

Cardiovascular diseases, including strokes, were the leading cause of death among Wisconsin residents, accounting for 32 percent of all deaths in 2007. According to the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, there were more deaths in the state from cardiovascular disease in 2004 than from cancer, car crashes, suicide, homicide and AIDS combined.

But Kaela is not your average stroke survivor. A dancer since age three, she is in excellent shape, eats well and does not smoke. As she runs her manicured fingernails through her long blonde and brown hair, it is easy to see why the doctors did not immediately think of a stroke when she arrived at the hospital that Saturday, mid-April 2009. After all, she was only 19 years old.

Hitting the wall

The day that would change her life started with a numb arm. A freshman at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., studying English and media communications, Kaela was home in Green Bay for spring break. She mentioned the numbness to her dad at breakfast, telling him that her arm felt like it was asleep. Figuring she had just slept oddly on her arm the night before, Kaela and her father were not overly concerned.

Kaela continued getting ready to go work at her mother’s hair salon, but had difficulty completing daily tasks, like fixing her hair, because she couldn’t hold onto her brush. But she thought she was just clumsy that day.

However, her symptoms grew worse. While working at the front desk, she stood up to serve coffee to a customer and nearly passed out.

“Everything just like blacked out. It felt like I hit a wall. Everything was black, and I just kind of tipped back a little. And everything slowly came back and I was like, ‘OK, that was weird,’” she says.

After the blackout, Kaela tried going to the break room — and discovered her left leg wouldn’t move. Although the break room was only 10 feet away, she struggled to make it.  Scared about her condition, Kaela called her mother for a ride home.  While she waited, Kaela tried to have a snack, but her arm would not cooperate.

“I couldn’t open my banana.  I couldn’t hold anything with my left hand,” she says. “I was sitting back there, and the girls and I were laughing like, ‘This is so ridiculous.’”

When her mom arrived, all it took was one look at Kaela to see that she needed medical attention.

“A man’s disease”

Although cardiovascular disease kills nearly one in three U.S. women, awareness of the disease and its symptoms is low among women in this country, says Lindsay Scheidell, director of communications for the Wisconsin chapter of the American Heart Association. The AHA’s Go Red for Women campaign found that only 55 percent of women recognize heart disease as their number one killer. Scheidell also says that cardiovascular diseases have a stigma as a “man’s disease,” in part because of the different symptoms for women.

“There are so many…flu-like symptoms,” she says. “…the medical community for a long time wasn’t trained on the different symptoms that we were telling women to look for,” she says. “So women might go in to see her primary care physician and say, ‘Man, I’ve had heart burn for the last week.’ And that’s probably the biggest thing that we hear when I talk to survivors is they’re like, ‘Oh, I had acid reflux or heartburn,’ or ‘I just thought it was something I ate’ or ‘I was getting the flu.’  Well it turns out, no, it’s your body reacting to, preparing to have a heart event. ”